The version of SBT, Scala, and other features is completely out of date. It cannot be built with Java 1.8.
The solution lies in bringing down the latest Lift 3+ starter and patching this code into that project. But, even then, it will not build; Lift and Scala both have gone through a zillion API changes.
One a trial build, I got 468 errors. Patching them is going to be a non-trivial task. It needs to be done if this project is to run in recent environments.